Growth was hiding a 6% conversion rate
- Client
- Bizness Apps
- Industry
- B2B SaaS
- Engagement
- In house, director
- Duration
- 2014 to 2016
- Stack
- HubSpot, Salesforce, Salesforce Marketing Cloud
What Bizness Apps was facing
Bizness Apps sold a DIY mobile app platform to small businesses and was ranked 58th on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing private companies in America. Growth like that is its own kind of problem. Lead volume was climbing fast enough that nobody was looking closely at what happened to those leads after they arrived, and the inside sales team was working a list nobody had defined.
The problem
Six percent of leads became sales opportunities. That number was not a mystery to solve so much as a symptom of never having decided what a qualified lead was. There was no scoring, no routing logic, no deal staging anyone agreed on, and no written handoff between marketing and sales. Marketing counted leads, sales counted revenue, and neither side could see the other's definition of the thing in between.
What I did
-
Defined qualified before touching volume
I worked with the founders and sales leadership to write down what actually made a lead worth a rep's time. Everything downstream depends on that definition existing, and adding volume before it exists makes the problem worse rather than better. -
Built scoring, routing and deal staging on that definition
Lead scoring against the agreed criteria, routing so leads reached the right rep, and deal stages that meant the same thing to everyone reading a pipeline report. -
Wrote an SLA between sales and marketing
A documented agreement covering what marketing would deliver, what sales would do with it, and how fast. Written down, so a disagreement was about the agreement rather than about memory. -
Gave sales visibility of prospect engagement
Engagement data surfaced on the record and notifications when a prospect showed intent, so reps could prioritize by behavior instead of by list order. -
Optimized the top of the funnel and consolidated the stack
Messaging, website UX and email automation workflows against an $840k annual paid budget across search and display, and a migration of marketing automation from HubSpot to Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Results
-
6% to 27%
Lead to sales opportunity conversion, within 12 months. The lift came from defining and enforcing qualification, not from adding lead volume.
-
$1.2M
ARR pipeline target owned and delivered over 12 months.
-
$840k
Annual paid media budget optimized across search engine marketing and display.
Elliot is one of a kind. We had the pleasure of working with him for about a year at Bizness Apps and accomplished some major milestones through his help. He came in with fresh ideas that not only performed well but provided a strong return on investment for our company.